Anyway, back in those days, Scorch increased all Fire damage taken on the target. I can't remember if the stack was to 3 or 5 (it's admittedly been too long for me to remember every damn thing), but we were there to really just buff our damage, Destro Lock damage, and Ele Shaman damage. Once that was up, you'd simply spam Fireball.

It was spell damage? or crit.. one of those.. Then they gave it to warlocks' shadowbolt...
Warlock damage was through the roof when they had a shadow priest.. good synergy with the shadow spells...

It was spell damage? or crit.. one of those.. Then they gave it to warlocks' shadowbolt...
Warlock damage was through the roof when they had a shadow priest.. good synergy with the shadow spells...

Going WAY BACK... Mage ignite stacking? ;D

My mind really plays tricks on me sometimes, but werent Warlock shadowbolt debuff increased shadow damage? And that was ok, but it stacked and everyone in the raid got the benefit. And if I remember right it werent till cata, that warlocks got the same debuff for shadowbolt than mages had with scorch.

And yes good old ignite, nothing was more fun than getting that first crit in the chain..

Scorch had a few variations. The last variation was 5% crit on 5 stacks, applied though one of our lowest damage spells. Warlocks could apply the same buff, with their primary nuke, and I can't recall if it applied all at once, or if it stacked up like Scorch did.

Combustion was a stacking 10% crit until you had three.

10/48/3 was a fairly common end game spec, as it gave you access to "ok" AOE, and all of the important threat/hit/mana reducing talents for Fire.

I think this was the 47/0/14 build, it's been a really long time since I thought about it, and even then, I think you needed much better gear than I had available to me at the time.

There were some wonky builds in there for sure, a 43/10/0 build that you could only do if you had enough hit on your gear to forgo the 3% from the frost tree.

I know I was running the 10/48/3 for a long time, and then when they just added more points going into Wrath, that moved to the 10/41/12 to get Icy Veins, and then to 0/53/18 Mana friendly, Hot Streak with Icy Veins Fire.

Then of course there was the 18/53/0 Torment of the Weak Fire, everyone pass that around to all of your mage friends, I think we all remember the Focus Magic circles, and or debating WHO was the best target in your raid if you were the only mage

At the time scorch was fire spell damage increase and combustion was a CD that increased your crit chance every non-crit until you crit.

In late BC, they also introduced Icy Veins (Or possibly just moved it so you could access it as a fire mage? I forget exactly the order of the changes. It was around the time Ice Block came to non-frost mages and might have been the replacement talent.) So the top build switched from a PoM/Pyro build to an Icy Veins build.

Fire also had a pretty strong execute range damage increase.

I was just getting started in those days, but maximizing damage was mostly: chain cast properly, minimize movement, don't let scorch fall off (but don't cast it early either), don't run OOM (which you would without a shadow priest--in your group, not in your raid--if you weren't very careful about using your gem and mana pots), and stack trinkets with IV/heroism while making sure you get an opportunity for everything to line up off CD while the boss is in execute range.

Combustion was stacking crit initially, 10% base and an additional 10% per noncrit until you had crit 3 times. It was like this until Wrath (around ICC I believe) when in addition to giving the stacking crit buff, it also increased crit damage. It wasn't until Cata that Combustion was reworked to be based off of your DoT damage. Initially it included all Fire based DoTs (including LB and Flamestrike). Eventually LB and Flamestrike were phased out, but I believe Pyro and Fireball remained until the Fireball DoT was removed in MoP, and the interaction between the Pyro DoT and Combustion being removed. This was also met with Combustion benefiting from the full damage of Ignite, up from half; which is a lot of what lead to the heavy Fire nerfs early in MoP.

As far as spec goes, Fire. I think many went Arcane/Fire hybrid. As far as rotation, I have no clue. As long as the mage kept up Scorch and spammed Fireball, after starting with a Pyroblast -> PoM Pyroblast, and kept their damage up, I didn't really pay attention.

---------- Post added 2013-07-02 at 11:35 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Durahal

Im guessing your guild didnt have enough warlocks then !

I just remember half of the raid would be locks and resto shamans.

As a healer in Sunwell, our entire healing roster was Resto Shamans and Holy Priests. Maybe we had a Holy Paladin on tank duty? Maybe. I don't know.

In T5 content, arcane was very strong thanks to the initial T5 set bonus (20% more damage and mana cost of arcane blast per stack). And later on, on some fights with 4pcT6+4pcT5 it still had its moments.

But for normal sunwell progression fire was the way to go. You could either go deep into arcane, or spend some of your points in frost to reach icy veins (the problem there was many talent points were wasted in frost as they had no influence on fire spells), and mana did play a major role even for fire then. You had to be in a shadow's group for mana, or you would go oom of the course of a fight (esp. Brutallus), one of the major disadvantages of mages compared to warlocks and hunters (additionally to the comparative low damage).
The rotation was quite simple: Keep scorch debuff up 5x, cast fireball.

On the other hand, you could easily spend you time duelling paladins standing out of swp and hoping that someone has to leave the raid to get a raidspot. I never lost a single duel!

My mind really plays tricks on me sometimes, but werent Warlock shadowbolt debuff increased shadow damage? And that was ok, but it stacked and everyone in the raid got the benefit. And if I remember right it werent till cata, that warlocks got the same debuff for shadowbolt than mages had with scorch.

And yes good old ignite, nothing was more fun than getting that first crit in the chain..

Pretty sure it was shadow priests plague or something that gave target % shadow dmg taken.. and it scaled with warlock stuff...

Then when we first had DKs.. their frost vuln worked for other frost classes

This is getting a little far afield, but nostalgia is fun sometimes...

The Warlock S Priest synergy was mostly due to Shadow Weaving which was auto-applied by S Priests and increased all shadow damage against the target by 10% and Improved Shadow Bolt from warlocks which left 4 charges on the boss giving another 10% increased shadow damage on shadow bolt crits. Direct shadow damage would consume the charges. So you wanted many warlocks spamming shadow bolt to keep those charges up. The increased shadow damage also meant that you got more mana returned by your shadow priests which lead to less time spent life-tapping by the warlocks and more damage (or more mana for your healers or a very lucky arcane mage).

If you're curious about old spell versions, you can look up a bunch of it by going to one of the wikis and finding the old versions of the page.

Edit: Scorch's fire vulnerability worked similarly as well and there were people who argued that a fire setup was viable with a mage scorching and fire destro locks. However, it was never as strong, and it was the fact that packing many shadow bolt spamming warlocks in made it easier to maintain improved shadow bolt at full stacks that lead to the class stacking we remember.

Seeing as there seems to be some interest in this, I thought I'd dig out some of the old combat logs I have stored away from late TBC.

Perhaps I was just stubborn, but I always loved playing 0/0/61 spec and stuck with it throughout TBC even through Sunwell. It was deadly in 5 mans from the control point of view and had high enough burst to do a decent job in raids though fell back in longer fights.

Back on topic - you can also have a chuckle at how simple everyone's rotations were back then!

I remember i had another Fire-Rotation back in TBC, with much more DPS over the Fight then only Fireball spam but it needed a really good Group Setup for the Mage.

You was able to skill Fireblasts cd down, so it was possible to play 2 Fireball 1 Fireblast rotation (of course with scorch debuff refresh sometimes). Fireblast had a much better Dmg per Secound rating then Fireball but an enormes Mana comsume.
So you needed a Shadowpriest and a resto Shaman in your group otherwise you had mana problems during the Fight.

With this Rotation the mage was the most Time of the Addon ahead of the Dps ranking and was still viable to the highest dps Classes in Sunwell.
But i think there weren't many Mages around playing this Rotation, because of a lack of Theory-Crafting-Sites or other Public-Information-Sites in these Days....

And for the high Ranked guilds there was another reason why they want to use Warlocks over Mages in Sunwell.
They had the same Dps and more Dps then Fireball spam Mages but the Reason was they have this ability (don't remember the Name) to get only 50% of Shadow Dmg which was overpowerd in sunwell Progress.